I'm back in Grand Junction until May, and with a throttled-back book schedule, I'm posting here again.

The first day back at the Day Center after a long absence always requires some adjustment. New rules get posted. The volunteer crew has changed. I have to reacquaint myself with where certain supplies are stored.

But most of all, I brace myself for the news.

It could be good, of course. Someone went back to work. A couple who'd been camping found a place to live. A court-assigned rehab is going well.

But it could also be bad. Someone's in prison. A couple's split and lost what tenuous support they gave each other. The lessons learned in rehab weren't applied on the street.

No one I know has died since I left last spring. At least from what I've heard. It's only my first day back.

It's kind of a mixed deal seeing people again. That they're here means they're alive and holding it together well enough to use our services. But it also means they haven't gotten out of their homeless state.

A woman I hadn't seen for a couple years was back today, as was a man who'd supposedly left to live with a relative in Wyoming last year.

These people who get called transients are often simply trying to better their situation. What looks like random chaos or vagrancy from the outside is sometimes a stab at improvement or survival made by a person with few resources.

The grass looks greener. An old family rift seems like it's repaired. Somebody knows somebody who might have work. Or it's just gotten too uncomfortable where they are.

There's a couple here I love whose troubles and craziness and addictions have finally blown them apart. The shortness of the fuse was apparent last spring but because I believe in their deeper goodness, I had hopes.

He shared with me what's happened since I went to his sentencing hearing. It was the usual mix of insight and acceptance of blame jumbled up with tales of financial irresponsibility, crazy infatuation and an attempt to puzzle out whether a certain winning Powerball number could possibly have been random.

I tried to follow his Kaballah-like calculations, which were mathematically correct but unmoored from reason.

Finally, he looked at me and said, "It's hard for me to occupy my mind every day."

Time is a very different burden for people with no job, no prospects and no home.

I talked to his wife later. I asked how she was doing and she told me a story about how last December she'd reached the end of her rope at 4 AM, standing wrapped in a sleeping bag outside the Mission, which is about as low as you can go to find shelter against the remarkable cold that had hit the valley. It's where the sex offenders and men released from prison submit themselves to Jesus because it's the only place that will take them in.

Her cell phone rang at 5 AM.

"It was my sister, who never calls me. She was calling to tell me she'd just won $5,000 in the lottery, and she was going to rent me a room."

I know the place. It's a house a few miles from us on Monument Road.

"I'm covered through February and then I'm going to take over payments."

I don't know what will happen down the road. The house is about three miles from town and there's no transit. She's fallen back before.

But I can see why her husband might be wondering if the lottery numbers are truly random.

Bicycling magazine named Minneapolis the number-one bike friendly city in the U.S. True? Hard to say, but we have a bike friendly mayor who may someday make Minnesota the most bike-friendly state.

*****

I used to play golf with a sweet man who had Parkinson's. It killed him a few years ago.

He wasn't quite as shaky as the man in this story, who had severe Parkinson's yet was able to ride a bicycle, but he could make putts that gave healthy men the shakes.

In case the "what's the point of this post" guy is reading: Don't assume — try.

*****

Decided at the last minute to do #30daysofbiking and document the rides with a photo a day. The cool thing about this is bringing together the hardcore riders with people just starting to realize what a bicycle can do for them.

Today, I didn't have any need to get out of the house. Had plenty of food, beer and writing work, but not much in the way of exercise, so I invented an errand to head down to my favorite beer store to load up on bombers from Avery and Great Divide.

Almost no matter where I am heading, I start downhill first, with a pretty spectacular view. I shot this one from the saddle on my way into town yesterday. (I mistakenly labeled it as day 1, but my day 1 ride was in the dark.)

Yesterday, I tried to locate a homeless man who had lost his entire camp to fire. I had a tent to give him, and I rode around town with it strapped on the back of my bike. I took a side trip along the Colorado River where some homeless men camp, riding a footpath past several camps, but not finding him.

You can see how dry the area is now with the winter-killed vegetation. Not a good place for a warming fire.

I did manage a flat tire. I'd unloaded my repair kit to more easily transport the tent, so I had a good long walk back to town for a fix.

Karma is not always what it's cracked up to be.

*****

On today's ride, I got to see three Suburbans zip behind me in formation as I rode along a river trail. I'd seen their vehicles several times at the airport and assumed they were either a charter service or the bus service for some kind of religious cult.

But today, they rolled into a parking lot where men were standing around like parking ushers. I stopped to watch as they circled the lot, stopped, and men jumped out of the doors simultaneously and struck paramilitary positions around the vehicles.

A Ninja Ken has just joined the figurehead phalanx of headless Barbies I attach to my Colorado errand bike as a security feature.

Unlike the usual discards I find in the street, this action figure wrapped in black wire, electrical tape and paint bears the marks of some kid's meticulous attention. I hope he isn't despairing over its loss.

Today, I had to answer the question: what happens to the stuff that's pumped from a septic tank? The results of my site-specific research will only show up in half a sentence of character development, but I wanted it to be accurate.

The temperature in Grand Junction is 8°, but it's a sunny mountain 8, which is good for at least 16, says the weather service. To someone who just left Minnesota, though, it feels like 32.

Near-record cold here with near-record snow uncovered a connection I'd never noticed before, since snow rarely sticks on the ground for long.

We live outside the city limits, and our street comes off the main road that heads over Colorado National Monument. It's plowed for a ways, but then the cleared pavement veers off to an intersecting street, and the remainder of the way to our drive is snow packed.

Back in Minnesota, as discussion rages about snow plowing on city streets, I look at Red Sand Road and wonder, why here and not there? Indeed, why did the county plows bother with us at all?

The answer: school bus route. No kids live on our end of the road.

Minnesota state demographer Tom Gillaspy is pushing the notion that education, which takes up the lion's share of the state budget, is an investment that benefits everyone, not just school kids and their parents.

"We need to cultivate the idea that this is a public investment. We
ought to think, 'When a young person achieves, he makes my life
better.' We need to think of education not as yours or mine, but as
ours."

Bryce was trim and kind of
handsome in that Mormon way that makes you think a little inbreeding isn’t all
that bad. He tempered the good looks some with a stubble he removed whenever he
took a hot bath, which was not too often. Pinky was rounder and looked a bit
like a frog, though if you said monkey, nobody would argue. He had the stubble,
too, but within it, he curated a mustache that the rest of America
rarely sees unless they visit Albania or deep cattle country.

— Work in progress

Describing a couple characters who decide to open up a hunting club on someone else's land, I reached for an analog to the cowboy mustache. Albanian facial hair seemed right, but I decided to confirm my hunch.